Will
by WhiteLadyDragon
Summary: How does the wish to die emerge: when one realizes that life itself is not worth her will, or when she realizes there's something more important than her own life? And how could these thoughts, if they could, deter this wish and spur the will to live? A companion fic to SOTC. Rem x Misa x Light.
1. Rem

_**Disclaimer! **_**All fictional entities featured/ mentioned in this segment belong to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, except Erin Blogger, who belongs to me. **

**A look into Rem's thoughts before she kills Watari and (tries to kill) L, followed by a glimpse of Misa's life in the aftermath of the Kira case. A two-part special. **

**This was majorly inspired by "A Shinigami's Justice" and "A Beautiful Way To Kill", both written by oursolemnhour49. Go on, now! Go and read her work! Don't just take my word for it. **

_**WILL **_

_So this has been your plan, all along…_

_Light Yagami, of all the human beings I have met, you are surely the most disgusting of them all. _

Only one other person besides Rem saw the odd, short-lived smirk on his face that he had passed over his shoulder to her, as casually as the way he would toss an apple over his shoulder to Ryuk. But only Rem could see the malice and utter self-satisfaction that crinkled the corners of his lips. Without even speaking to each other, each knew what the other was thinking at that moment, but it was obvious who had the upper hand.

A human having a shinigami at his mercy…what a humiliating position.

Although, he was not the first one to have had her.

No, this was far graver than that. Light had ordered Misa to recover the other notebook and regain her memories, to continue killing in his place. He had purposely set her up to look suspicious, practically begging "Ryuzaki" and the task force to capture her again through her actions.

To her dismay, her lifespan had showed up over her head clear as crystal. She had done the Eye Deal again, with a nonchalant Ryuk, this time, and now only had ten years left to her name. Even that much wouldn't matter in the least, if she gets caught now…

"If they would admit to killing with the notebook, they'd receive the death penalty, or at least life in prison," said Ryuzaki, popping two panda-shaped cookies into his mouth. The sound of his chewing sounded like the cracking of bone in Rem's ears. "That's the best that they could hope for," he mumbled with his cheeks puffed out.

_You're certain that I would do anything to help Misa and save her life. And at this point, the only way to save her is for me to write Ryuzaki's real name in my notebook. But if I kill him…I'll end up just like Gelus. I'll have deliberately prolonged Misa's life, and I will die, as well. Light has planned everything so that it would work out in his favor. _

Ryuzaki…or rather, L Lawliet, didn't have that long to live, anyway. 272 days. Not even a year. Not short enough for her to expect him to die naturally, though, without her intervention.

"What're you smirking about?" asked the girl sitting next to Ryuzaki. The name over her head read Erin Blogger, but the humans called her "Elin." Another alias. She still had fifty years to go. Misa had almost the same amount of years left when they had met (courtesy of Gelus, of course).

The smirk on Light's face vanished, replaced with a calm, even smile that fooled everyone in the room but her, whom he went back to ignoring. "Oh, it's nothing. This case has certainly taken an unexpected turn, but I'm confident we'll be able to bring Kira to justice, yet."

"Yeah, ditto!" cheered Touta Matsuda (forty-five years), pumping his fist into the air.

"Hm? You don't look so good, Elin. Maybe you should go rest?" His concern sounded too genuine to really be so. Rem found herself needing to hold back a snarl, unusual for a creature who was supposed to be unfeeling.

"Probably just something I ate. I did gorge on a lot of candy, yesterday. Gentlemen, include me out."

She had a hand over her stomach with a queasy, pale look on her face as she hoisted herself onto her feet, still recovering from her splurge from the night before. Sweets, humans called them, some of which she had offered her, though she did not so much as touch them. Ryuzaki ate even more of the stuff than her, just about every day.

Why did humans feel so compelled to take more than they needed, no matter how sick they knew it would make them? Shinigami killed humans for their lifespan, but this was only once in a while, mostly when it would occur to one that his or her time was almost up, which just went to show how sluggish they had become. Compared to humans, who always seemed to be on the move, always in a hurry, never at ease for long, and only at rest when their lives ended.

Maybe that was it? Humans were rarely, if ever, satisfied with what they had. Their hunger for life urged them to take more, even if it meant taking from others of their own kind. It was one of the things that had made Rem so disgusted with many of them. She had seen greed at its worst in her time with Kyosuke Higuchi, the proxy she had chosen for Light's plan. She had deemed him an easy enough person for Light to catch without his memories of the Death Note: he had the motivation, but lacked the level of cunning intelligence that his predecessor had. He couldn't even carry out his plans independently; he'd had to rely on seven equally greedy associates—or rather, blackmail them—into collaborating with him, and yet spoke to them as though he were the most superior in the circle.

As soon as he had begun talking about taking Misa as his bride and investing money into her "life insurance"—a despicable thing in and of itself, to place something as worthless as paper and coins onto something as invaluable as life—Rem had to keep reminding herself of Light's plan to still her hand from writing that fool's name in her own notebook, already. At least Light was killing "for the betterment of mankind." All Higuchi was after was money and social power.

But now she had seen Light's true colors. This wasn't about creating a gentler world, anymore. This too had become about power, the gaining of more power than a human could, or should, be entrusted with, and anyone who appeared to be in the way would be dealt with swiftly and cleanly. This included Rem, and, if she were not careful, Misa.

Erin made sure to keep a sizable distance from her as she walked past, almost glancing at her from the corner of her eye before her gaze darted towards the floor, like she were afraid Rem would attack her if she so much as looked her in the face.

Or was there something she urgently needed to say, but was afraid to share it?

While Rem had no affection towards the human, she also seemed to be one of the very few humans who didn't stir intense disgust within her. While she was as restless as any human, if not downright wired if her reaction to seeing her was any indication, she otherwise appeared to have not an ounce of real hatred in her body, completely incapable of mind games. Though not without her own bouts of selfishness, she seemed to genuinely care about the people around her all the same, even Ryuzaki.

In a way, she reminded Rem of Misa.

Or rather, who Misa used to be.

…

_Rem and Gelus were not friends by any stretch of the word; until certain events, she didn't believe that shinigami were capable of being friends or having friends in each other, never mind with humans. The word did not exist in their common vocabulary. _

_Actually, no one was Gelus's friend. He was more the butt of everyone's mockery than anything, a small dumpy thing who spent nearly all of his time peering through the many windows that opened to the human world far below. When and how his habit began, no one knew, much less cared. _

_The first time she took up watching over Gelus's shoulder, the sight they beheld was one that should have repelled them from watching again. Not that shinigami were horrified of the darker goings-on of the human world, but this was certainly nothing Rem would linger around a portal to see. _

_Two-thirty in the morning at a household in Osaka. The lights flickering within its windows. A mother and father, lines etched into their faces by time, worry and mounting resentment, jumping to their feet as a young woman stumbles into the den, her hair, clothes and breath reeking of a liquid chemical that humans call alcohol. They're shouting at the woman, demanding answers as to where she's been, whether she thinks that this has gone on for long enough. _

_Rem can't make out the woman's exact words, her speech is too slurred. But they sound indignant and yet strangely apathetic to the anger of the other two humans. She throws a bottle at the mother's head, barely missing the loose bun on top of her head before it shatters into shards against a painting of a mountaintop. Punctures a sizeable hole in the center. _

_While the conflict escalates, in a room at the end of the hall, a young girl—no more than fourteen years—ducks away from the crack in the door she's been spying through to cower in the corner beside her bed, a blanket wrapped around her bare shoulders like a shawl. She clutches the fabric in her sweating hands, her fists pressing a panda plushie close to her chest. _

"_Stop it," she whispers through gritted teeth, curling in around herself. She's trembling with the urge to cry. "Please, just stop it." She repeats her plea over and over like a mantra, but no one can hear her, not over this commotion. _

_Minutes pass that feel like hours (by the human world's definitions of time, at least). By the time it's all over, the woman—Kimiko Amane—is led away screaming and writhing in handcuffs into a car flashing red and blue. She would never return to this place. Only when her parents are left alone in the doorway, the mother weeping as she dabs away at the gash on the father's face (there would be more bloodshed to come, not that any of them know this), does the little girl—Misa Amane—dare to venture out, still wearing the blanket and clutching the panda. She rubs at her reddened eyes in feigned sleepiness, pretending that she has only just now woken up. She does not want to worry them any more than they already are. _

"_Mommy, Daddy, what's going on? I-I thought I heard sirens…where's Kimi?" _

_Her question is redundant. The looks on their faces tell her everything._

…

Gelus would be there to see Misa come home to a ransacked house and the bloodied, mangled remains of her parents about four years later, just in time to see the killer—Yoichi Tamura—leap out of the balcony with a feral grin on his face, wiping the blood from his knife on the cloth of his sack. He would be there to see Misa cry behind closed doors and put on a brave face for the public during the trial, unable to do anything to comfort her. He would be there to see her make her rise to stardom, become a believer of Kira after the mysterious death of Tamura, and of course, to see her be ambushed by Ryotaro Sakujo, the man who was supposed to have killed her that night. Rem asked him, time and again, why he was so fascinated with the human world, for it seemed like such an ugly place to her, a place of chaos compared to the calm emptiness of their realm. Shinigami did not hurt and torment each other like humans did. They lacked the drive to do so.

Gelus, shy and soft-spoken, replied, "Not everything in it is ugly."

Indeed, he had found a sliver of beauty underneath all of the blood. Rem had never thought that he would become so attached to this beauty that he would break the rules of life and death and sacrifice himself for it, but he did.

And now here she was, in the same position.

"There is something we could try," she heard L say, watching as he hooked a finger into his mouth. "I can have Watari submit a request to say, the FBI or CIA to let us choose two convicts on death row. We can test the Death Note—"

"Ryuzaki! We can't do that!" Shuichi Aizawa scolded. "There's no point in testing it if we know the notebook's power is real."

"That's right! It's not good that you could be so willing to throw away the lives of two people like that," said Soichiro Yagami.

"The subjects would be on death row anyway, and if this were done properly, we could save many more lives," L said matter-of-factly, almost wearily.

"That may be, but after the fiasco with the FBI agents, I doubt that the organization would be up to doing something like that," said Light. A catty remark disguised as admonishment.

_If Ryuzaki wants to test the 13-day rule, perhaps I can make them believe the rule is valid by killing the person who writes in the notebook after thirteen days? _

_But I'd have to be there to see them, and as long as I am attached to Light, I cannot go very far..._

She could just kill Light Yagami right now and be done with it. But what about Misa? She would be so unhappy if something happened to her beloved savior, especially if she believed the fault was her own. Rem knew from her first three days in confinement, from the way she had sobbed and begged Rem to kill her, that Misa would choose to die for his sake, and surely Light, arrogant Light, had known this when he set this plan into motion.

If she died, who would be there to safeguard Misa from his wrath? Ryuk would certainly never step up to the task. Misa was capable of defending herself as long as she had her own Death Note; she had spoken so cheerfully about it before. But that was before she saw Kira's face and fell in love with him, in almost the same way Gelus had, with her.

…

Rem had given her Gelus's notebook after his death because she'd thought she deserved it. Gelus would've wanted her to have it, something to protect herself with so no one could hurt her anymore. When they had met, Misa had even briefly mistaken her for an angel—whatever that was—rather than a shinigami.

Now she began to wonder: had giving Misa a Death Note been a mistake?

Had Misa never met her and had the Death Note, she would've never become the Second Kira, never would've met Kira and fallen in love with him, and wouldn't be in this danger that she is in now.

But that wasn't all. While Misa had been grieving before, asking herself what kind of life this was that she and her family existed in where the bad guys got away with everything and the good died in such ugly ways, something truly began to change in her when the Death Note had fallen into her hands. She was sweet and energetic enough with others on the surface, but how much did people really matter to her, anymore? Little, if not nothing at all. She held an entire TV station staff hostage, killed innocent policemen without hesitation. All to meet her own ends. To meet Kira himself, to thank him for punishing the man who'd slaughtered her parents, to see if she could help him with creating the new world.

Not even her own life seemed to matter to her, anymore.

…

"_So…if he'd never fallen in love with this girl, he'd still be alive today, wouldn't he?" _

"_That's right." _

_After a moment of thick silence, Misa's smile became dreamy as she looked down at her Death Note—Gelus's Death Note—pressed to her chest, clutching it a bit tighter as though it had become that much more precious to her. "I had no idea…I thought it was luck, but it turned out to be a shinigami who saved my life that day." _

"_Yes. Gelus loved you enough to die for you." Rem pointed a long, skeletal finger at the book in Misa's arms. "So that Death Note is now yours to keep."_

_Misa flopped down onto her bed, her eyes shut to the world as she pondered over the fairy tale she had just heard. "I see. So, for a shinigami to die, they have to love a human enough to want to prevent their death from happening. What a beautiful way to kill…" _

_Rem cocked her head to the side, doubtful of the logic behind Misa's words. It had never occurred to her that killing could be anything beyond a means to prolong her life. "Beautiful? To kill out of love? How so?" _

"_Because it's different," said Misa, a bit matter-of-factly for her. "When most people kill or are killed, it's usually violent. It's ugly. But to kill or be killed because you love someone…that's not ugly at all. It's a peaceful way to go, it's lovely. Better than out of bad luck or greed. Life is hard, ugly enough as it is, and everyone has to die eventually. Misa knows this better than most. So why not die in a lovely way? That's how Misa would want to die." _

_Rem didn't know what to say. She personally saw it as a cruel way to die, having one's love for someone used against them, but what did she know? _

"_So what about you, Rem? Are _you_ in love with Misa? Be honest." _

_From just hearing these words, Rem started to wonder whether she should regret having told Misa this story. "Just forget it," she said. "You think you can kill me that easily?" _

_Misa giggled. "Oops, you saw through that?" She turned her head to stare up at the shadows on the ceiling. "Misa's so happy to have such an interesting story to tell Kira. But Misa wonders…if he knows, too? How to K-I-L-L a god of death?"_

…

Despite Rem's request to never repeat the secret to killing a shinigami, that ended up being one of the first secrets Misa shared with Light when they had met face-to-face, and Rem had been powerless to stop her.

Somewhere in her heart of hearts—assuming that she had one to speak of—Rem could not deny that she was as important to Misa as Misa was to Light. Which was to say, not at all. Light did not love Misa, and Misa did not love Rem. All she was to her was leverage, a means to wrap him around her finger and to let him wrap herself around his.

Misa, while still beautiful on the outside, had, in a sense, degraded into something as ugly on the inside as the people who had hurt her throughout her life. So why did Rem not find _her_ disgusting? Because she had seen who she was before shinigami and the Death Note entered her life? Because she believed that a being capable of giving herself completely to someone else did not deserve to die?

Because she loved her? Rem didn't know.

Rem watched from the shadows as Erin argued with him, the two of them still dripping with rainwater. Somehow she too had pieced together what Light was up to, and was begging L not to go after Misa, not to test the fake rules of the notebook, surely there had to be another way. She looked ready to hit him, but instead dropped the towels and bolted in the opposite direction.

"Miss Crocker! Where are you going?" Odd: for some reason, his lifespan had dropped from 272 to 22 days in only a few days. Was something going to happen to him soon if nature was allowed to take its course?

Or could he have...?

No. No way. No human would willingly do _that. _Would they? She hadn't seen him or his associate do it...

"To do something that you won't! I don't know how the hell you got the others on board with this, but those notebooks are toast, even if I have to toast the motherfuckers myself!"

Such ugly words, but she was offering a chance to save Misa, and oddly enough, Light too. Were humans capable of such compassion, after all?

L wouldn't have it. Rem watched him chase her in almost the same way Ryotaro had gone after Misa, tackle her like a panther overpowering a ram, pin her against the wall, knock her unconscious. She might have thought he'd killed her, had her name and lifespan disappeared, but they remained over her head unchanged.

Though Light's enemy, he was no different than he was. He was not looking out for Misa's interests, either. Only his own.

Higuchi. Light. L. None cared for Misa any more than they would, a useful tool.

_So that's it, then. There's no bargaining with him. He's going to send that human, Watari, for her. I have no choice. I must kill them both, for Misa's sake. _

Rem became filled with a profound and terrible rage she didn't know she was capable of, and reappeared before L in the monitor room to watch events unfold, waiting for the right time to make her move. She refused to look Light in the eye, the entire time.

She didn't know of this justice that Light and L spoke of, either. Justice, from what she's heard, was supposedly about getting what one deserved. But who deserved what for what? And who had the authority to decide this?

Did she deserve to die for ruining Misa's life, or for failing her duties as a shinigami?

…

_Light Yagami…he has surpassed even a shinigami. And to think that Misa is in love with such a man. _

The desire to die is a blatant contradiction to the most basic instinct of all living things, of plants, animals, humans, even shinigami, who exist on the barren border between life and death. How does this desire emerge: when one realizes that life itself is not worth her will, or when she realizes that there is something more important than her own life?

Maybe she and Misa were not so different? Misa clung to Light because out of everyone, he'd had yet to let her down. He had put meaning back into her life, promised her that there would be something greater than this life that she knew if she worked alongside him for it.

And in an odd way…perhaps Misa had unknowingly done the same for Rem, and for Gelus before her? Was this a good or bad thing? Rem didn't know, and it was too late for it to matter now. As soon as the last panicky letter had been scribbled into the page, Rem wasted no time tearing open a fusebox to sever a live power cord with her fingertip, unconcerned for its purpose except for the one tiny spark she needed to set the book ablaze.

_Know this, Light Yagami. This is my Death Note, and you shall never claim it. I will not let you use my Death Note against her. _

_Misa…whatever you do, please, be happy in the time you have left. _

The swell of foreign yet vaguely familiar emotion began to disintegrate, crumbling at her feet into dust and sand, like how tears rolled down human cheeks, with the rest of her. Strangely, a part of her expected this to be what humans would call painful; it had looked painful when it happened to Gelus, or to the thousands of people whose hearts stopped beating under Light's pen or Misa's.

But no. This was more like falling, like how it felt when she landed on the ground after flying for so long (goodness knew that she had flown this plane of being for quite some time).

In her last moments of existence, she felt…free.

On the other side of the wall, L's lifespan clocked down. 21 days.


	2. Misa

_**Disclaimer! **_**All fictional entities featured/ mentioned in this segment belong to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, except Erin Blogger, who belongs to me. **

**A glimpse into Misa's life in the aftermath of SOTC. **

**I had a heavy debate with myself about this; I don't feel I gave Rem and Misa the attention they deserved, especially towards the ending of SOTC. Obviously, a happy ending is off the table, but the more I thought about it, the less sense a downer ending would've made. In the end, I decided to leave it open, to both hope and despair…**

…

The nightmares don't affect her the way they used to, anymore. In the beginning, they used to jolt her upright, electrocuting her back into mundane reality (not that reality was much different from the dreams she awoke from). Sometimes she would scream, to compensate for the fact that she couldn't within her dream and to lighten the weight crushing her chest.

Oftentimes, her shriek would not be met with an answer. No one would come to her room to ask her what was wrong, to wrap her up in their arms as she settled back down in a soft burst of tears. No one has since her parents died.

Or have they? Misa can't remember, and what would it matter if she did? They aren't here now.

Nowadays, she doesn't bother to scream when a nightmare comes on. She doesn't even spring up in bed. They come so frequently now that it's almost silly to react so melodramatically to them. Waking up from a nightmare is like coming up to the water's surface gasping for air, staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling as her vision tries to accommodate to the darkness. Matted gold tresses cling to her face and the nape of her neck; she's so wet and smelly with sweat, she may as well have been underwater, this whole time.

Being the award-winning (or at least nominated) actress that she is, she's gotten good at hiding her night frights. She could lay there under the covers in the throes of visions of blood and disembodied squeals of agony, and no one would know the difference. She'd turn to face the window, to watch the dark blue of the night turn purple and pink with dawn through the crack in the blinds as she caught her breath.

Another day. Another day like the one before, and the one that will follow. She's still warm and pink with life, but can feel her insides rotting slowly, slowly, just a little more each morning, each evening.

Misa always hated monotony.

This room is not her own, hasn't been for the past two, three weeks? Misa has lost track of the days since they dropped her here, after catching her trying to drop herself off the top floor of a building.

It feels as though bits of her mind have been bleached out, the colors, the images underneath the white forever hidden from her. Things that she can't help but feel she's supposed to remember, but can't and won't. This used to scare her. Kimiko did that to herself all the time with booze, so she could forget about being depressed. She hasn't seen her since who knows when.

Light. He still hasn't come to see her, hold her, tell her that everything will be okay. He never will, either. He can't because he's gone. Collapsed in front of everyone, in front of her, clutching at his chest and howling in agony. Mr. and Mrs. Yagami no longer have a son, and for Sayu, no big brother. Kira had killed him. Somehow he had tracked him down and out of everyone in their group, he'd picked him out for his next sacrifice. Watari, too. Before Light's death, she had had the chance to see him collapse as soon as he had stepped out of the elevator. He had brought her back to headquarters to see Light and company.

But how could that be? Higuchi was Kira, and he had died several days before then. Could it have been Ryuzaki's…or rather, L's doing? Being L and Kira at the same time, hired to hunt yourself and having someone else take the rap for it…what could be better?

No. As creepy and shady as he was, he didn't seem like the type to just go out and kill people. People, especially criminals, were too useful to him to want to take on what Kira had tried to do. He was not the crazy vigilante type that blindly shot people he considered bad; he wanted to catch them in the act, first. And anyway, he's dead, too. For all of his audacity, even L was a mortal, after all. A mortal whose heart could be broken as easily as anyone else's, whose life could be stolen from him just as swiftly as anyone's.

It's amazing, how quick life can just slip out of her hands. To think that every time she blinks, someone in the world somewhere is drawing their last breath. Doesn't matter who they were, what they did, who loved them, whether they deserved it. It's terrifying. It's fascinating. It's motivating.

Why had she tried to jump? She's not sure. The urge had come to her as effortlessly as the urge to scratch an itch. A bad itch. It's a bad itch. It's wrong to want to die, she's been told all her life, despite the fact that death will come for everyone one day. It's like voluntarily holding your breath when sooner or later you will have to start breathing again.

She sits up in bed with a pillow in her arms, her chin resting on top of it. The only scenario that makes a gram of sense to her is—

…

Maybe L had been right all along? That Light really was Kira, and she the Second Kira? She doesn't know where they could've gotten the power to kill all of those people, nor does she know why she can't remember ever using this power, why she no longer has this power (she knows this much because criminals have stopped dying since that day, no matter how much she wants otherwise), or what could have possibly gone wrong to have had things end up like they are now, but of all the dim, broken thoughts floating around in her head, this one seems to glow the brightest.

She reaches deep inside herself, but can find no guilt over her imagined crimes. Is this a good or bad thing? Well, it wasn't as though her victims hadn't deserved what had come to them. Yet…

The plain and simple truth was, no one could feel guilt's sting when they couldn't remember doing what they were guilty of. This was what motivated people, like Kimiko or Tamura, to get drunk or high at any cost. So they could forget about how rotten they were and how ugly life was.

…

What if Erin and the task force were right? Maybe the two Kiras really had been no different than the criminals they slew? Misa had thought Tamura a monster for killing her parents and displaying nary a sliver of remorse over it, yet now here she sat with blood on her own hands (she can almost smell the warm metallic aroma on her fingers), no idea how it had gotten there and no guilt over its presence.

But it was different when it came to Kira, she reasoned. Kira killed to protect those who could not protect themselves. He guaranteed justice that the legal system failed to bring her and so many others. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good, and those "sacrifices" were barely worth tears to shed for, anyway, in her humble opinion.

She used to think that that would be a dream come true, to be working side by side with the one who'd avenged her mother and father, who doubled as her lover, in creating a better world, ruling together as god and goddess. But now…

Where had their work gotten them? Her god had left her, in spite of her best efforts to make him stay, and the world at large. Society is rotting again, like a once beautiful cake left to the open air to spoil and fester. And she is just as rotten as the rest of it, no matter how much she dresses herself up, no matter how peppy and colorful of a front she puts up. L had spared her. Why would he? Why would they let _her_ live, the one who'd killed Ukita, one of them, one of Aizawa's closest friends? They should've let her die with Light, let her be with her parents.

She trembles with a paralyzing cocktail of fear, shame, rage, grief and loneliness. To feel the way she does is the only way she knows she's still alive, but now there's no use for them. She never wants to feel again. She wants to be somewhere else, where her loved ones are. Somewhere where there is peace; she won't get that here.

_Stop. As long as they think I'm gonna kill myself, I'll never get out of here. _Misa rubs at her eyes, this time without worry of ruining her mascara. _I'm an actress. It shouldn't take that much effort to trick these idiots into thinking I'm normal again. It might take a while, but it'll be worth it when they let me go. Then, when that happens—_

The creak of the door's hinges breaks her train of thought.

Instinct prompts her to shield her face, immediately putting up a pleasant, coy front that feels oh so fake to her. "Hey there, haven't you heard of knocking? Hold on, Misa hasn't put on her face, yet!"

The door quickly swings back until it's ajar. A tired voice mutters from behind it, "Ah. Sorry. I really should have knocked. I can wait."

Recognition jolts up her spine. _That voice…is that…? _

_No. It can't be…_

Misa curls in tighter around herself as she wiggles on her bottom so she faces the door. Her breath hitches in her throat. It can't be. It just can't be. What would ever bring her back here to her? Maybe she's still asleep, and this is another dream? Another nightmare?

Her name rolls off her tongue, weak and thick. It leaves a strong, bitter aftertaste in her mouth like wasabi. She never liked wasabi, though _she_ had always loved it. "K-Kimi?"

The door creaks open a little, revealing a woman's eye, dull and hazel and almond-shaped. It looks like her sister's. It blinks at her, adjusting to the light, or lack thereof, in the room. "Hi, Misa. M—may I come in?"

Misa doesn't know what to say. The little girl in her had expected Kimiko to come barging into the room, tipsy as a drinking bird with a hair-trigger temper. This Kimiko is asking if she can come in, completely sober. At least, so far she sounds sober.

Before she can think over her words, they escape her lips, half-timid, half-hostile. "I don't know. Can you?" Her fists clench against her breast, white and tingling with the lack of circulation.

There is a long, an unbearably long pause, before the door swings open, and somehow the woman who steps in looks like her dear big sister, and at the same time doesn't. This Kimiko's face looks washed out, her gaze distant. What's up with her right eye? It's still and non-reactive. Eyes aren't supposed to look like that. Her clothes are slightly wrinkled but clean, and they seem to hang off of her. This Kimiko has a white scarf tied around her head, her hair, dark and short and choppy, springing out from under the hem in feathery tufts. In her hand, a cane supports her weight. A soft, somewhat sheepish, somewhat hurt smile is woven into her thin lips.

This Kimiko doesn't look like she can, or wants to, cut up her face like she had their father's, or otherwise hurt her.

The woman looks about the room, too absentmindedly for Misa to believe that this is in fact the sister she used to know. When she had been sober, anyway. "There's a lot of colorful stuff in your room…"

She must be talking about the balloon and plushies and flowers and cards tacked to the bulletin board by the sink. Couldn't she see that for herself? "Y-yeah. They're get-well presents, mostly from fans of mine."

"Wow. You got all this from your fans? They must really miss you."

Maybe they do. But who do they really miss: their darling Misa-Misa, or the real Misa Amane?

"Couldn't you tell that by just looking? Is something wrong with your eyes, or what?" she asks, half out of sarcasm, half out of apprehension.

Kimiko hobbles in across the threshold by a few feet, and Misa can't help but notice the limp in her left leg. What's happened to this woman? The sister she remembers had never looked as humble or repentant as the sister standing in front of her. "You could say that. I can see light and color okay, but not much else. In my left eye, at least. Can't see a thing in my right. Funny thing: even though we're given two eyes, we only lose a fifth of our field of vision if we lose one of them. Did you know that?" Her chuckle is pained and awkward.

Misa can feel worms crawling in her gut. She feels sick, all of a sudden. "Wait. So, y-you're telling me that you're—"

Kimiko nods. "Yeah. I'm now legally blind."

"H…how did that happen? You weren't blind before."

"Got behind the wheel one night after coming out of a bar. Fucked up my leg, managed to cut open the back of my head," Kimiko says flatly. "I still have the scar. You don't have to see it if you don't want to, though. You never were crazy about that sort of thing."

Misa's emotions are boiling, sizzling over, like a pot left unattended. "Driving drunk, huh? Why am I not surprised?"

Kimiko cringes at the sharpness of Misa's words. Misa herself doesn't like the venom dripping from them, but can't find it in her to stop. How dare she show up in her face like nothing has happened?

"Kimi, why are you really here?" She uncurls herself and plants her bare feet on the cold linoleum, but still clutches the pillow tightly to her chest. To keep her already broken heart from going out to her sister and letting her break it again. "I don't see or hear from you in almost six years, and now you have the gall to pop in from out of the blue like everything's fine?"

"Misa, I—your friends got a hold of me, told me what's been going on with you. They said that you tried to kill yourself. I had to come back—"

Misa's laugh is too bitter for them both. "Come back? It takes you hearing about me attempting suicide for you to come back after all this time? I'm shocked that you were sober enough to even listen. Who are these friends who told you this anyway, huh?"

"Touta and Kanzo."

Misa freezes. _Matsu and Mochi? Why…? _

She snarls. "Where were you for all those other times I needed you? Where were you when Mom and Dad were getting cut up to shreds? Where were you during the trial? Where were you when I was getting tied up and tortured for something I didn't even do?" Tears singe the lining of her eyelids, as acidic as the blood in her veins.

_Did do_, a voice from a dark corner in her mind whispers. But Kimiko doesn't need to know that. She'd never believe her, anyway.

Kimiko hangs her head. "I'm not here to make excuses. And I'm not going to pretend that anything I do from this point on will take back everything I've done in the past. But…you're my sister, Misa. I just think it's time that I start being a sister to you again."

"You abandoned us, Kimi. You abandoned _me._ The only two people who've been there for me are Light and Kira. And now…"

She almost chokes at the image of Light's dead face flashing through her mind. "And now they're gone, too. Kira betrayed me, like you betrayed me. He took Light from me. We were going to be so happy together, and then he just took him from me."

_After everything I did for him…_

To her dismay, Kimiko starts to limp across the room, closing in on her, her hand stretched out to her. Her fingernails are icky and yellowed. "Please, Misa…I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything. Let me see you," she pleads, her own eyes becoming shiny with tears. "I need to see you. I _want _to see you…"

For a moment, Misa almost wants to let her do just that. But another swell of anger surges through her, from the chest outward, and she lunges to her feet.

"Get away from me!" For the first time in forever, the little sister is stronger than the older, and she knocks her to the ground, kicking the cane out of reach. The way Kimiko cries out cuts her deep down, and yet satisfies her in a sick, sick way.

"Misa," Kimiko chides her, her voice thick with unshed tears as she feels the ground for her cane, "stop this nonsense. I know you're angry, but you have to let go of it. I don't want you to end up like me."

It might be too late for that.

Misa glares at the scarf on her sister's head, burning a hole through it. "You should have died," she hisses, unsure as to whether she really means this or not. "Y-you should have died all mangled and covered in blood, just like Mom and Dad did." She feels like attacking her again, but something won't let her. Kimiko already looks so helpless on the ground.

The older Amane sighs. "You know, Misa? Sometimes I would think the same way. I made my parents and little sister suffer and left them to clean up the mess I made. I couldn't keep my marriage together. I couldn't even carry my first child to term. For whatever reason, I refused to get my act together. I should've died in that crash.

"But I lived, instead. It's sad, how these days it takes people dying or almost dying for us to wake up, to realize what's really important. But it's damn effective. Or at least it has been for me. I've paid for my mistakes, and now it's time for me to…"

Misa doesn't see it coming. Before she knows it, Kimiko wraps her arms around her waist and pulls her squealing onto her knees at her level. She wraps her into a hug, her hand cradling her head against her lean shoulder.

"Stop it, let go of me!" Misa screams, her tiny fists beating at any part of her sister that she can get at. She hits her, bites her, wriggles around in her arms to break free, but they seem to tighten around her, the more resistance she puts up. "You don't understand! I don't want a reason to keep living, anymore! I'd rather be dead!" In the throes of her tantrum, she yanks off the scarf, revealing patchy clumps of hair between areas of bare scalp. She can see the corner of a thin, white scar creeping up from behind her ear.

"I love you, Misa. I've never said that as often as I should, I know I've hurt you, and maybe you don't believe me, but I still love you. We can take what's left of us and start over. If only you would just find it in you to—"

"How can things ever go back to the way they were?" Misa demands, her forehead against Kimi's chest, her tears now streaming down her heated, reddened face without restraint. "Can you bring Mom and Dad back? Can I bring Light back?"

_Can I bring myself back? _

"Shut up, Kimiko! Just shut the fuck up! Stop talking about a better future that may never happen! Stop trying to fool me! Stop trying to—stop trying to…give me a reason to…"

She can't finish. The lump in her throat explodes into a sob, saturated with confusion and stubbornness and despair and a foolish love for the woman stroking her hair that pushes itself to the forefront, no matter how bad she has been to her, and vise versa. It saps whatever fighting spirit she still has in her, and she buries her face in the warm fabric of Kimiko's shirt to cry.

She no longer smells of booze. She smells like her sister.

…

Matsuda bites his lip. He pulls away from the crack in the door, his stomach in knots over the scene that's just erupted behind it. "Mogi, things are starting to get hairy in there," he whispers. "Maybe this was a bad idea? We'd better get in there and—"

A large, meaty hand claps over his shoulder. Matsuda turns to look at Mogi through wide, worried eyes. His partner shakes his head.

"I think they're working through it, already."

The two of them are there only for damage control, something that cannot be done until after the storm passes. Until then, storms must be left to rage themselves out.

Still in doubt, Matsuda turns his gaze back towards the inside of the room. Misa's still crying. Kimiko starts to rock her, quietly. There's no need for words, right now.

_**END**_


End file.
